My Return to the Theatre

So the play I'm running lights for opened Thursday night. It's been a long week but a successful one. I'm quite enjoying being back involved with theatre. I've realized how much I missed it from my life.

Theatre and drama have always held a spot in my heart. I love the sense of community that develops when you take a group of people, that may not otherwise would have crossed paths, and you throw them together for several months to work towards a common goal.

It inevitably has it's ups and downs, successes and challenges. When you emerge on the other end of it you have learned a lot about yourself and about the others you worked with. You learn things about people that you would never otherwise have had the opportunity to learn because you've been in cramped quarters with them for several months. You are forced to deal with them and co-operate with them even when you don't feel like it. This experience produces and closeness and intensity I have not found matched in anything else I've done.

When it's all over there is definitely a mourning period. When you put so much of your energy and heart into something inevitably you're sad when it's done. I remember when I was younger and I would be missing the daily routine of rehearsal or performance after it was done. I'd miss the people I worked with. A year later when it would all come around again it was never the same. Each experience was unique but there was always this teensy bit of sadness that I would never have that exact experience again.

I love the challenge of solving problems on the fly in front of a live audience. It's totally exhilarating. We've only had one major problem and that was an actor not being on stage when the lights came up on his lone little bench downstage left. I looked up to see the lights come up and no one be on the bench. The stage manager talking to the asm found out the actor was not backstage and no one knew where he was.

While the ASM went looking for him the SM and I discussed the best course of action. He wanted me to dial the lights back a cue to the blackout but I argued that the audience would know that something was wrong. I said we should wait it out a tiny bit longer and we added a sound cue to make up for it. The actor eventually came wandering in through the gate on stage left and luckily it fit his character to enter like that.